Report of the 29th Meeting of the Executive Committee of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV)
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Virology Division News
Report of the 29th Meeting of the Executive Committee of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) M. A. Mayo Scottish Crop Research Institute, Invergowrie, Dundee, U.K.
The 29th meeting of the Executive Committee (EC) of ICTV was held in Washington, D.C., USA at the end of April 2001. All but one of the members of the Committee were present. The topics discussed can be described under 6 headings. 1. Communication with virologists The 7th Report of ICTV was published in late 2000 [3]. More copies have been sold so far than was the case for the 6th Report. An “on-line” version has been produced and this will be sold by Academic Press as part of a “de luxe” edition of the Report. Knowledge of virus diversity continues to accumulate and it is clear from the volume of taxonomic changes proposed already that there will be a need for a revision of the 7th Report. An 8th ICTV Report will be needed and will probably be produced some time after 2002, but the timing and the method of its production are yet to be decided. An important channel of communication from ICTV to virologists at large is publication of articles (such as this one) in the pages of Virology Division News (VDN). ICTV wishes to get as many as possible of the taxonomic changes introduced by decisions of the ICTV presented as articles in VDN with some explanatory text. The Virosphere, is a presentation in diagram form of virus diversity showing the shapes of the virions of each of the genera of viruses, each arranged by genome type and principal host. It has been found to be a very useful teaching and explanatory aid. A new edition will be appearing in the near future. 2. Statutes / International Code The procedures of ICTV and the rules concerning its actions are published in the Statutes [3] and International Code [1, 3] respectively. Minor changes were proposed at the meeting and these will be put to the respective parent bodies, namely IUMS Virology Division (for the Statutes) and the full ICTV membership (for the Code), for decision in the near future. Revisions will be published in VDN.
Virology Division News
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3. Procedures for handling taxonomic proposals At the EC meeting, there was extensive discussion of criticisms received by ICTV recently concerning the extent to which taxonomic proposals are available for virologists to comment on prior to a decision being taken by ICTV. The result was that the EC decided to initiate a new procedure in which proposals are seen by the EC at least twice. The first time is a pre-proposal stage for preliminary soundings after which proposals will be available for scrutiny by all virologists. After this consultation, the proposal stage is what has been the procedure before, namely that the EC examines the proposal, together with whatever comments have been forthcoming, and decides either to recommend proposals to the full ICTV for voting or to ask for further modification by the proposers. This procedure will be described more fully in a short article in following edit
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